Oxygen/Nitrogen Gas Separation by Polyetherimide Hollow Fiber Membrane: Effects of Bore Fluid Rate on Permeance and Selectivity

Abstract

The demand of the oxygen and nitrogen gas had been increasing exponential since the industrial evolution. The conventional gas production technique such as cryogenic distillation and pressure swing absorption able to produce high gas purity and production rate. However, the conventional technique required extensive plant size and energy requirement. Membrane technology has been a key research over the past decades due to its dignified separation technology where no addition of chemicals, low energy usage as well as low setting up requirement. Polymeric hollow fiber membranes are commonly fabricated by dry-jet wet phase inversion attributed to the ability of mass membrane production. To date, many literature reported the effect of the fabrication parameter on the spinning of the hollow fiber membrane such as air gap and force convection on the properties of the membrane, however to the best of our knowledge, there is few attention to study the effect of bore fluid flow rate. In this work, polyetherimide (PEI) is fabricated by dry-jet wet phase inversion techniques with different bore fluid flow rate to evaluate its effect on physical properties and gas permeation of oxygen/nitrogen. Generally, the PEI membrane possess similar morphology of possesses asymmetric thin and dense structure supported by finger like structure. However, the thickness of the membrane decreases with the increase of bore fluid flowrate. The gas permeation study suggested that PEI membrane with highest bore fluid flow rate (1.0 mL/min) in this work possess yield the highest selectivity (3.92), gas permeance for both oxygen (47.15 GPU) and nitrogen gas (12.03 GPU).